That is what was presented to my son’s Cub Scout troop by a chemistry professor and a Christian (and not of the moderate or liberal persuasion of your approved list). After amazing the boys and fulfilling their natural little-boy pyromania proclivities with shows of bubbles, bangs, and mini-explosions over Bunsen burners, the professor presented them this carry-away thought: though they might be impressed by the magic that he performed they should remember the greater magic that made all that possible to begin with.

I thought you might enjoy that little story, Mr. Harris.

And since science changes, or as you like to think, progresses, I wonder what you would say if science, forty years from now, when you are nearing 80, would find some use in the cells or organs of 80-year-old men for the benefit of those much younger and of more use to society?

You feel that an ethical system can be based on the feelings of empathy that have evolved in us. You share your colleague Peter Singer’s view. Singer, Ira DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, gushes with sympathy for little piglets—to the point where he thinks the healthy ones should be allowed to live, while the handicapped month-old baby should be put out of its misery. He begins his argument, as he necessarily must, by doing away with Biblical principles and law: the idea that we are formed in God’s image, and therefore are above animals. He, like you, thinks that Christian proscriptions—like those against killing babies or having sex with animals--are just so much “poppycock.”

You answer your critics about the atheism of twentieth-century dictators: “Christians like yourself,” you write, “invariably declare that monsters like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and Kim Il Sung spring from the womb of atheism. While it is true that such men are sometimes enemies of organized religion, they are never especially rational.”

But would you hold up Professor Singer as an example of a rational person? How about the other respected professionals—the doctors and professors--who wrote academic and policy papers on their new-found procedures of gassing “idiots” and “imbeciles” in Germany? The method went through its testing phase in teaching hospitals on subjects who were too young or too retarded to be deemed rational enough to “live a life worth living.” Hitler then grasped onto this idea of “scientific advancement” and applied the procedure on a massive scale to other groups, as we know. While you deem Hitler “delusional,” what about the doctors who gassed three-year-olds? What about Professor Singer, who feels that euthanasia is appropriate for infants—if their parents make that “choice”?

What words of comfort would you give to the father of the three-year-old child dying from leukemia (as some, in spite of the advances of science, still do). Would you advise him to euthanize the child to prevent suffering (being as tender-hearted as you are)? Would you explain that this is natural selection?

You pride yourself on your belief in equality, in democracy, and point to the “barbarism” of the Old Testament in its treatment of women and slaves (though you didn’t bother to research the translation of the term “slave” from a more general one meaning “servant” and the Biblical reference to slavery as an historical fact that Christians had to deal with, and not something they promoted). But did you know that historically Christianity was the first real democracy? Yes, even secularists and “progressives” admit that. It is a widely accepted historical fact.

But I notice that your little book, displayed prominently in the bookstore chains, even among the suggested “holiday” reading of the last Christmas season, has been flying off the tables. It entered the New York Times bestseller list almost immediately and remains at #3 on Publishers Weekly Religion Bestsellers.

I have seen the customers who fondled your book and read the jacket with self-satisfied expressions. These were the ones you blessed as “progressive” in your pages. Your condemnatory letter was not addressed to them. Your little tome at $16.95 graces their bookshelves along with those by Bill Moyers and the atheist authors you recommend. These progressives proudly display their reading material as they serve canapés and cocktails to similarly correct-minded, nipped and Botox-ed activists, who only really just want what is good for us. Your slim, easy-to-read pamphlet is just right for trips to the salon, masseuse, and transcendental meditation retreat. Your fans cluck over the ignorance and benightedness of those like me—their gold and diamonds shining in the ambient light of their converted warehouse condos. You amaze them with your profundity, your ability to string together clichés and tired arguments, and in 91 small widely spaced pages tear down the foundations of the civilization put in place by millennia of thinkers and the Church Fathers. For your book, they whipped out the credit cards from Louis Vitton bags.

They also paid to see Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 and thought it was a documentary.